Originally from Petty Harbour, Newfoundland, composer Jason Noble completed his doctoral studies at ÎŰÎ۲ÝÝ®ĘÓƵ and currently works as a postdoctoral researcher on the . During the application process, he pitched an idea for a new piece that would help bring ACTOR’s bubbling enthusiasm for timbre and orchestration outside of the academic community—something allowing new audiences, especially young ones, to explore the wide and wonderful world of tone colour. With timbre, texture, dynamic shaping, micro-timing, and more, tone colour is one of the most powerful and expressive aspects of classical music, and yet it has been all but overlooked by traditional music analysis.
The ACTOR Project is building the tools to change that with their three major research axes: Analysis, Tool Development, and finally, Output Innovation. This third axis invites artists and scholars to integrate the fruits of ACTOR into the teaching, research, and creation of orchestration and timbre-related subjects. Output InnovationĚýis the focus of Jason’s postdoc, and Cameron Chameleon is perhaps the most colourful example of innovation yet! Read the interview below for more on the ideas behind this piece, and don’t miss the premiere on Friday, February 7 at 10am and Saturday, February 8 at 7:30pm, both in Pollack Hall.ĚýIf you can't attend in person, the concert on February 8 will be webcast on .
For you, what is so captivating about the idea of orchestration?
Many things. Current orchestration research overturns some assumptions that have been embedded in the way we have thought about music for a long time. Orchestration is a fairly ancient art, but a lot of music scholarship has been based on the assumption that pitch and rhythm are the two main parameters, that that’s what music is—you write the notes, and then whatever tone colours you use to fill them in are nice but secondary. I haven’t believed that for a long time.
Sound itself is inherently fascinating and meaningful. There are so many aspects of the musical experience that pitch analysis doesn’t begin to touch: aspects such as timbre, texture, dynamic shaping, micro-timing for me are some of the most important, expressive aspects of musical experience. I love being active at a time when we’re turning our heads to get a fuller perspective on these enormously rich parts of music.
Why is it so important to share this idea with children?
It’s a very intuitive idea, for one thing. I think the only real reason kids draw with a box of crayons but don’t make music for orchestras is that for orchestras, you need fifty people and a whole bunch of expensive instruments! But kids can play with sounds just as well as they can play with colour. If you could boil that down to an app they can have in their living room, then I think they’ll be able to be just as creative in the sound world as they are in the colour world.
On the other hand, in a world where people can pick up an iPad and hear all these amazing sounds, perhaps the motivation to spend twelve years getting good at playing violin is diminished. And so I don’t think we can take for granted that kids are always going to want to play instruments. If they do, it’ll be because we manage to capture their imaginations and introduce them to the amazing things instruments can do.
We know that there all kinds of physical, mental, emotional, and cultural benefits that come with making music beyond just aesthetic pleasure. It would be a real shame for the next generation of kids not to benefit from that; I believe in music-making as a participatory activity for the general public, not just a small group of music specialists, and reaching out to that public through contemporary composition is a very high goal that I’ve pursued for many years.
What’s the origin story for this piece?
I grew up loving pieces like Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Then, a few years ago, I did this project with the Esprit Orchestra in Toronto, where my master’s supervisor and I went into classrooms and worked with kids to create pieces of music. The kids got to spit out ideas, and it was our job to turn it into a piece for the orchestra that they got to hear performed. It was a sweet deal for them!
On the same concert, though, there was a thirty-five minute narrated piece for symphony orchestra called A Young Person’s Guide to New Music by Canadian composer Brian Current. It blew me away. It was designed to introduce young audiences to all sorts of pitch-related, melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas in contemporary music. Tone colour was there too, but fairly briefly near the end. The piece is absolutely brilliant, but I did think, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was also a piece that really focused on tone colour?”
I think kids are imaginative and smart enough to get their heads around the ways sounds are combined if it’s presented to them in the right way—they’re smarter than we let on sometimes! It’s about opening their eyes to all the different ways sounds can be combined into textures and effects: one instrument can stand out from the background, there can be several different layers happening together, multiple instruments can confuse into a single texture, and so on. The narration of Cameron Chameleon is definitely storytime, but these ideas of orchestration are there just beneath the surface.
The ACTOR Project defines orchestration as the choice, combination, and juxtaposition of sounds to achieve a musical goal. Can you give an example of how you approached this in Cameron Chameleon—what was the goal and what sounds did you combine to achieve it?
First, the chameleon character makes a lot of sense for an orchestration-based piece because they change colours all the time; they can’t be simplistically paired with one instrument. In the first part of the piece, the various different colours and textures that Cameron can project are introduced with “magical” sound effects signalling changes from one colour to the next.
A good example of ACTOR’s definition of orchestration is the way Cameron begins each day. I wanted to get a good sense of textural integration—different active instruments coming together into one single perceptual texture. So I decided to start the day with a feast of jungle bugs. Kids like things that are a little bit gross sometimes! If you’ve ever been to the Insectarium and seen all the different shapes and colours that bugs can be, it’s quite a panoply.
I picked the woodwinds for this section, because for one thing, they’re the most heterogeneous family in the orchestra, and for another, woodwind players are generally used to doubling on multiple instruments. So the flutist will put down the flute and pick up the piccolo, the oboist will pick up the oboe and put down the English horn, and so on.
I ask all the woodwind players to change very rapidly between instruments, which creates a visual effect of a flurry of motion, a big tangle of bugs all crawling over each other. I ask them to be as animated and exaggerated as possible in their motions. Everyone’s tone colour will also be a little different; it won’t create a perfect blend, but rather a busy, dense texture with lots of energy and kinetic activity.
So we’ve got the colours, the shapes, the activity, and the multimodal effect of having visual and auditory paired together. Another example: “His tongue went zip and a bug went splat,” which is captured by the violins. They go zip—a very fast gliss to the top of the instrument and while the bow shoots out like a tongue and then comes back. I’m not sure how that’s going to work with the music stands. I hope we don’t have any accidents!
What do you want audience members of any age to take away from your piece?
The interaction of words and music is a big one—the different ways that instrumental sounds come together and how that changes over the course of the piece in different contexts.
But I hope they’ll get something out of the story, too. I started with this chameleon idea, developing different scenes appropriate for the chameleon’s daily life. By the end, though, the piece developed a real moral, because whether walking in the grass or in the riverbed—there’s even a game of chameleon hide and seek—Cameron always uses his magical colour-ÎŰÎ۲ÝÝ®ĘÓƵ ability to hide. There’s something sad about the idea of having that amazing ability and using it to make yourself blend in rather than stand out. I don’t want to give away the story, but in the end, that gets dramatically turned around.
Finally, if you were an animal, what would you be?
I would be my dog Kelly, because she’s spoiled rotten.
Listen to the Brian Current piece that inspired Jason below. Brian is one of our Graham Sommer Competition jury members! Don’t miss the premiere of Cameron Chameleon, along with Alain Berlaud’s L’enfant d’élĂ©phant and Philippe Macnab-SĂ©guin’s Seizing to be ceased,Ěýthis weekend in Pollack Hall.Ěý
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